Learning to break bad news in the best way
By Tom Ford
Minneapolis Star Tribune
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Two items have stayed linked in Barb Degnan’s wallet going on 15 years.
One is a photo of her son Dan Carland, smiling and clad in a shiny blue robe on his graduation day from the Blake School. It’s tucked in front of the business card of state trooper Michael J. Hanson.
Two days before Christmas 1992, at a Minneapolis hospital, Hanson was the one who described to Degnan the car crash that killed Dan.
She remembers that Hanson answered her questions “in such a way that it was the truth, but it wasn’t the brutal truth. He was just very gentle about it. ... Without him, I don’t really know how I would have made it through that night.”
Degnan and her mementos illustrate that how people are told the worst news of their lives can be as affecting as the news itself, and why for nearly two decades a pair of veteran victim advocates have been training State Patrol officers how best to deliver that news.
On Tuesday, the fruits of that unique effort were on display when Minnesotans for Safe Driving awarded trooper Doug Rauenhorst -- who had been at the scene of a fatal drunken driving crash in March 2000 -- for the sensitive and professional way he informed family members about what happened.
In recent years, the training program has expanded to close to a dozen other police agencies across the state. At no charge, the two advocates try to teach officers how best to inform someone that a loved one has died.
“There is nothing, nothing in the world worse than having someone come to your door out of the blue and telling you your loved one is killed,” said Sharon Gehrman-Driscoll, director of Minnesotans for Safe Driving, who has led the training with Nancy Johnson.
It is such a traumatic experience that most people will recollect every detail of that moment, Gehrman-Driscoll said.
Yet despite the gravity of the process, many police agencies in the state report that they’ve never trained officers.
Some larger departments -- with bigger staffs or chaplain corps -- can make sure that notification duties are left to senior officers. In Bloomington, the assignments are almost always given to the police supervisor on duty or a chaplain, not a rookie cop, said Cmdr. Jim Ryan.
Many other agencies lack that ability, and so an inexperienced officer might often be asked to deliver a notification.
Because new state troopers have to perform that duty, they receive the training as rookies.
Rauenhorst, who is assigned to Steele and Rice counties, took the training in 1996, and just a year later saw why it was important.
After five people died in a multivehicle crash in Blooming Prairie, Rauenhorst and an officer from a different agency had to notify close friends of four of the victims. The other officer spoke to them first at their home, saying the friends had died in a crash. “That was basically it,” Rauenhorst said, and the other officer left.
“They deserve more time and more answers,” Rauenhorst said.
He stayed at the friend’s home for another 15 to 20 minutes, responding to the questions and disbelief.
Guidelines, not process
The class doesn’t try to lay out a prescribed procedure for notifications.
Rather, Johnson and Gehrman-Driscoll stress the methods and comments that can help and those that can hurt.
It helps to make sure an officer spends as much time as relatives need to deal with their initial shock and grief.
They advise against doing a notification by phone unless it simply cannot be avoided. Or denying someone a chance to view a loved one at a scene or a hospital, even if an officer believes they are trying to protect them from an awful sight.
Gehrman-Driscoll was driven to teach the classes largely because of the number of mishandled notifications she heard about, such as the story of Mary Ann Mundahl.
Her 19-year-old daughter, Lisa, was killed in 1989 after her boyfriend ran his pickup truck into the back of a snowplow south of Brainerd.
Alone at home in Bloomington, Mary Ann Mundahl got a call from a doctor asking if she was Lisa’s mother. The doctor then told her Lisa was dead.
“She went around and broke everything,” Gehrman-Driscoll recalled. And Mundahl told her later: “I’m lucky I didn’t really hurt myself.”
State Patrol Lt. John Nagel was confronted by several similar stories about seven years ago, and “went home wringing wet,” he said.
Gehrman-Driscoll had convened a panel of people who had gone through bad notifications, and asked Nagel to interview them as part of a video for the training classes.
“The thing that was the biggest eye-opener for me was the fact that these people were angry with law enforcement as much as they were with the individual that killed their family member,” Nagel said.
He offers his advice at many of the training sessions.
“If you screw it up, you’ve screwed it up for them forever,” he often tells other officers.
Plus, he said, the duty never gets easier.
He added: “Do [the notifications] hurt when you give them? Sure they do. I mean, I’ve walked out of houses in tears ... If any police officer tells you they can walk in and do them and stay calm and cool, they’re lying to you.”
Degnan plans to keep the trooper’s card forever.
Around Christmas each year she gets a call from crash investigator Tom Ludford to say he’s thinking about her and her family.
“As the years go by, the thing you’re so afraid of is that your child will be forgotten,” she said. “And those were two of the people who remembered him.”
Staff writer Randy Furst contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 Minneapolis Star Tribune